Day 17: Guilty As Charged

Karmic punishment is swift and terrible – where I’m concerned, there’s none of this waiting-for-doom-in-the-next-life stuff. One day, I’m cracking jokes about aging-hippie silversmiths whose hands are stained with forging gemstones, and the next my own hands are permanently dyed the same shade of scarlet.

God only knows what toxic chemicals are in those candles. They’re on me and in me, now, too. I’m already sprouting hair in weird places (ah, the rewards of feminine maturity); I hate to imagine what sort of side effects exposure to radioactive red might have.

I picked the tapers up for a song at a second-hand store, still in faded original packaging from an impoverished third-world nation.

Remarkable! That last phrase is free of racist world-leader vulgarity. It can be done!

I spend 49 cents on candles for my table. I don’t pay $10 at some overpriced craft store that refuses to fund birth control for its insured employees and beats its self-righteous chest about closing on Sundays so that the godless floozies who work there can go to church and ponder the evils of promiscuity.

But I digress.

I wrestle those candles into their holders. They feel a little greasy, but things happen when we sit on the shelf for years, unwanted and unloved (see “weird hairs,” above). Satisfied, I push up my sleeves, pick up my phone, and brush back my hair. The shirt, the phone, and the hair are all white.

Or were. I leave indelible red fingerprints all over everything.

So here’s the plan: I’ll rub today’s red candle over yesterday’s faded fake coral, and let the shyster silversmith know I found a better con.